Sunday, May 19, 2002

Business 2.0. - Warren Buffet on

Business 2.0. Warren Buffet on corporate profitability and the stock market over the next 14 years. He expects the market to grow slowly over the next major period. Why? Corporate profitability will not increase as it has in the past (it is currently at a very high percentage of GDP) and interest rates have little room to decline further. However, I am more bearish than he is due to the impact of the New Economy on corporate profitability, specifically due to this: >>>I won’t dwell on other glamorous businesses that dramatically changed our lives but concurrently failed to deliver rewards to U.S. investors: the manufacture of radios and televisions, for example (also aircraft and cars). But I will draw a lesson from these businesses: The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage. The products or services that have wide, sustainable moats around them are the ones that deliver rewards to investors.<<<I contend that the “moats” and “barriers” to corporate competitiveness, his pick for the only true predictor of long-term coporate profitability, are starting to fall due to better information flow and outright public resistance to inefficient pricing/business practices. [John Robb’s Radio Weblog]